Thread: problem with sample program

i have a problem with the example program in the beginners C 'Command Line Arguments' tutorial.

i have the code exactly as is provided on the page. compile with gcc with no errors.
the code works all fine, except when i run it with an unexisting filename, it then displays the message correctly, but gives after that a segmentation fault error:

Could not open file
[1] 13302 segmentation fault (core dumped)

since i'm just beginning with programming, i would like to know what is going wrong here.
if needed, i can paste the code here, but i let it out for now because it's on the site too.
http://www.cprogramming.com/tutorial/c/lesson14.html

thanx in advance,
brabo.

is that because it was outside the curly brackets in which the variable 'file was declared?

grtz,
brabo

please bear with me.
why was the file not opened correctly and how did moving up fclose() solve that?

grtz,
brabo.

The sample code has an if statement that first checks to see if the file was able to be opened. The else statement only executes if the file was able to be opened. However, because the fclose statement is outside of the if...else control structure, it will try and (write and) close the file whether it was able to open it or not. By placing it in the else statement (which should only execute if the file was able to open), you are preventing the error that happens when trying to (write and) close a File that was unable to be opened in the first place (probably because it did not exist).

Hope that helps.

any non-existent filename gives the segmentation fault error.
the output is as shown in my first post.

Could not open file
[1] 13302 segmentation fault (core dumped)

Yes. When fopen goes to open the said file, if it does not exist, it returns the address of NULL instead of the address of said file (It doesn't exist). You cannot fclose (write and close) a file at address 0. It will give a segmentation fault (You can't write anything to a non-existing block of memory.

Make the change suggested by Salem and you should no longer get the error. If the file doesn't exist it should print "Could not open file" to the screen.

ah yes, it idd solved it. but i now understand why the move of fclose resolved it.
thank you for your explanation gwarf420.